Earlier this week, the DOJ’s Inspector General issued a heavily redacted report about the FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit (CAU), which found “shocking” violations, including embedded telecom employees providing customer phone records in response to post-it notes.

While the underlying violations are egregious enough, the report itself is problematic because it redacts huge swaths of information that is already publicly known.

As we discussed in our last blog post, the report cryptically refers to AT&T, Verizon and MCI as Company A, B and C. Yet, the source that identified the telecoms embedded with the CAU was none other than FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni, in sworn testimony before Congress. Moreover, information in the IG report combined with letters to Congress from the telecoms themselves shows that Company A is AT&T.

The IG report also redacts the amount paid to the telecoms when we already know they were paid $1.8 million a year, and that, in 2008, the FBI asked Congress for $5.3 million for further “funding for the telecommunications industry participation in the Telecommunications Data Collection Center (TDCC).”